NASA’s Cloud Computing Technology Chosen as Key Element in New Open Source Initiative

The core technology developed for NASA’s Nebula cloud computing platform has been selected as a contributor for OpenStack, a newly launched open source cloud-computing initiative, which will bring together more than 25 companies to collaborate on pushing cloud computing standards for interoperability and portability.

“We hope that OpenStack will form the foundation of a new open source cloud ecosystem,” said NASA Chief Technology Officer for Information Technology Chris C. Kemp. “With Nebula technology at the core of OpenStack, NASA will be uniquely positioned to drive standards that will ensure products and services powered by OpenStack will meet federal interoperability, portability, and security requirements.”

OpenStack is the first large-scale open source cloud project of its kind and is expected to gather significant momentum in the cloud and open source communities.

“Nebula technology was selected for inclusion in the OpenStack project because of its massively scalable architecture and the high quality of its code,” said Jim Curry, director of OpenStack.

Raymond O’Brien, Nebula’s program manager, said participating in OpenStack will allow NASA to tap into a community of open source developers and “enable us to benefit from crowd-sourced development efforts.”